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Cultural Comment

A Better Way to Think About the


Genre Debate
By Joshua Rothman November 6, 2014
Illustration by Ellen Surrey

ast month, when the fiction finalists for the National Book Awards were
L announced, one stood out from the rest: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John
Mandel. While the other nominated books are what, nowadays, we call literary
fiction, Station Eleven is set in a familiar genre universe, in which a pandemic has
destroyed civilization. The twistthe thing that makes Station Eleven National
Book Award materialis that the survivors are artists.

Mandels book cuts back and forth between the present, when the outbreak is
unfolding, and a post-apocalyptic future, when the survivors are beginning to
rebuild. In the present, actors are putting on a production of King Lear, and a
woman is writing and illustrating her own comic booka mournful science-fiction
story set on a malfunctioning, planet-sized spaceship called Station Eleven. (The
comic book sounded so interesting that I searched for it on Amazonunfortunately,
its fictional.) Meanwhile, in the future, a group of survivors have formed the
Travelling Symphony, a wagon train that travels the wasteland, performing
Shakespeare and Vivaldi in the parking lots of looted Walmarts. (People want what
was best about the world, one man says.) Eventually, past and present converge: a
few issues of the comic book outlive the chaos, and end up influencing the survivors
just as much as Lear or A Midsummer Nights Dream.

Station Eleven, in other words, turns out not to be a genre novel so much as a
novel about genre. Unlike Cormac McCarthys The Road, which asked what
would remain after the collapse of culture, Station Eleven asks how culture gets put
together again. It imagines a future in which art, shorn of the distractions of
celebrity, pedigree, and class, might find a new equilibrium. The old distinctions
could be forgotten; a comic book could be as influential as Shakespeare. Its hard to
imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary
moment. For a while now, its looked as though we might be headed toward a total
collapse of the genre system. Weve already been contemplating the genre apocalypse
that Station Eleven imagines.
ts hard to talk in a clear-headed way about genre. Almost everyone can agree
I that, over the past few years, the rise of the young-adult genre has highlighted a
big change in book culture. For reasons that arent fully explicable (Netflix? Tumblr?
Kindles? Postmodernism?), its no longer taken for granted that important novels
must be, in some sense, above, beyond, or meta about their genre. A process of
genrefication is occurring.

Thats where the agreement ends, however. If anything, a divide has opened up. The
old guard looks down on genre fiction with indierence; the new arrivalsthe
genrefiersare eager to change the neighborhood, seeing in genre a revitalizing
force. Partisans argue about the relative merits of literary fiction and genre fiction.
(In 2012, Arthur Krystal, writing
writing in
in this
this magazine
magazine, argued for literary fictions
superiority; he fielded
fielded a pro-genre-fiction riposte from Lev Lev Grossman
Grossman, in Time.)
And yet confusion reigns in this debate, which feels strangely vague and
misformulated. It remains unclear exactly what the terms literary fiction and genre
fiction mean. A book like Station Eleven is both a literary novel and a genre novel;
the same goes for Jane Eyre and Crime and Punishment. How can two
contrasting categories overlap so much? Genres themselves fall into genres: there are
period genres (Victorian literature), subject genres (detective fiction), form genres
(the short story), style genres (minimalism), market genres (chick-lit), mode genres
(satire), and so on. How are dierent kinds of genres supposed to be compared?
(Literary fiction and genre
writing
fiction,
in this
onemagazine
senses, arent really comparable categories.)
What is it, exactly,
fielded
about genre that is unliteraryand what Lev Grossman
is it in the literary that
resists genre? The debate goes round and round, magnetic and circulara lovers
quarrel among literati.

o a degree, the problem is that genre is inherently confusing and complex. But
T history confuses things, too. The distinction between literary fiction and genre
fiction is neither contemporary nor ageless. Its the product of modernism, and it
bears the stamp of a unique time in literary history.

The relationship between novelists and genre has shifted several times, often in ways
that seem strange to us today. In 1719, when Robinson Crusoe appeared, many
people considered the novel, in itself, to be a genre. The novel was a new thinga
long, fictitious, drama-filled work of proseand its competitors were other prose
genres: histories, biographies, political tracts, sermons, testimonies about travel to
far-o lands. What set the novel apart from those other prose genres was its
ostentatious fictitousness. When Catherine Morland, the heroine of Austens
Northanger Abbey, is rebuked for reading too many Gothic novels, the proposed
alternative isnt literary fiction but non-fiction (a friend suggests she try history).
Northanger Abbey was written in 1799. In England, Middlemarch is often cited
as the first novel you didnt have to be embarrassed about reading. It was published
in 1872.

A vast cultural and technological distance separates Robinson Crusoe and


Middlemarch. Between those two books, modernity and mass culture were born.
Bookselling became a big business, as did culture in general. Realism appeared and
ascended. The novel splintered
splintered; it came to seem less like a genre in itself, and more
like all of literature except for poetry. It grew to contain genres: Journey to the
Center of the Earth was published in 1864; A Study in Scarlet introduced
Sherlock Holmes, in 1887; Dracula was published a decade later. Over time, the
novel attained respectability and became an institution. At the top of that
institutional hierarchy the social novelists, like Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells,
pulled away from the eccentricities of the Victorians; they aimed to recreate, in novel
form, the non-fiction prose that the novel had displaced. By 1924, Virginia Woolf
was complaining about the stuy, intellectualized sanctimoniousness of those books.
To finish them, she said, it seems necessary to do somethingto join a society, or,
more desperately, to write
splintered
a cheque. The big-time novelists, she went on, have
developed a technique of novel-writing which suits their purpose; they have made
tools and established conventions which do their business. But those tools are not
our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin,
those tools are death.

The modernists saw, correctly, that novel-writing, once an art, had become an
enterprise. More fundamentally, it had internalized a mass view of lifea view in
which what matters are social facts rather than individual experiences. It had become
aliated with manufactured culture, with the crowd, and with the sentimentality and
repetitive stylization that crowds, in their quest for a common identity, often crave.
In reaction, they created a dierent kind of literature: one centered on inwardness,
privacy, and incommunicability. The new books were about individuals, and they
needed to be interpreted individually. Instead of being public resources, novels would
be private sanctuaries. Instead of being social, they would be spiritual.

omething of that spiritual aura still hovers around our sense of what it means to
S read and write literary fiction. And there are some ways in which the
modernist critique of mass literature is just as trenchant today as it was back then.
(The modernists never got to see fandom; if they had, I doubt theyd be pleased.)
On the whole, though, we live in a dierent world. Today, the novel isnt an ossified
institution; its an uncertain one. (Television is the prestige medium; its where the
social novelists work.) Literature has moved on: the books we now regard as
literary fiction are actually very dierent from those the modernists sought to
create and elevate. They are more diverse, and more extroverted. And mass culture
has also changed. Its been replaced by what Louis Menand describes
describes as a great river
of pop, soulful, demotic, camp, performative, outrageous, over-the-top cultural
goodsin short, by pop culture. The distinction between literary fiction and
genre fiction accurately captured the modernists literary reality. But, for better and
for worse, it doesnt capture ours.

Its tempting to think that we might do without these kinds of distinctions


altogether. Why not just let books be books? The thing is that genre doesnt have to
be vexing. It can be illuminating. It can be useful for writers and readers to think in
terms of groups and traditions. And a good genre systema system that really fits
realitycan help us see the traditions in which were already,describes
unconsciously,
immersed. As it happens, there is such a system: it was invented by the Canadian
literary critic Northrop Frye, and laid out in his 1957 masterwork, Anatomy of
Criticism. (Frye, who trained as a minister and never earned a doctorate, is one of
the most influential genre theorists of the twentieth century.) Its ideally suited for
an era in which the novel seems more diverse and unpredictable than usual.
ryes scheme is simple. In his view, the world of fiction is composed of four
F braided genres: novel, romance, anatomy, and confession. Pride and Prejudice
is a novel. Wuthering Heights isnt: its a romance, an extension of a form that
predates the novel by many hundreds of years. (The romancer does not attempt to
create real people so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological
archetypes, Frye writes. That is why the romance so often radiates a glow of
subjective intensity that the novel lacks.) Novels take place in the regulated world
in societyand are driven by plots. Romances take place in vacuo, on the moors,
where nihilistic and untamable things tend to happen. The characters in romances
are often revolutionaries, but the social anities of the romance, with its grave
idealizing of heroism and purity, are with the aristocracy. For that reason, novels,
which thrive on social sophistication, often incorporate romance in an ironic way
(Don Quixote, Lord Jim). Many young-adult books, like those in the Hunger
Games trilogy, are pure romances: maybe, instead of asking why so many grownups
read young-adult novels, we ought to be asking why novels are losing, and romances
gaining, in appeal.

Its still possible to find nearly pure novels (The Love Aairs of Nathaniel P.) and
nearly pure romances (The Days of Abandonment, The Road). But the
confession and the anatomy, Frye argues, are just as influential, even if they are less
likely to stand alone. Rousseau, of course, wrote the prototypical confession: a single
prose narrative in which the personal, intellectual, artistic, political, and spiritual
aspects of his life are integrated. It is his success in integrating his mind on such
subjects, Frye writes, that makes the author of a confession feel that his life is
worth writing about. (By this light, Karl Ove Knausgaards My Struggle is a
confession rather than a novel.) The anatomy is similarly intellectual; the dierence
is that its impersonal. It deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes,
and proceeds through the creative treatment of exhaustive erudition. Robert
Burtons Anatomy of Melancholy is Fryes ur-example of an anatomy, but you can
recognize the anatomys presence in books like Gullivers Travels, Moby-Dick,
Infinite Jest, and InIn the
the Light
Light of
of What
What We We Know
Know. Fryes scheme is, on the whole,
value-free: none of these genres are better than the others. But he cant help being
impressed with compound forms. He praises Moby-Dick for being a romance-
anatomy, but hes even more admiring of Remembrance of Things Past, which
combines confession, anatomy, and novel. He is blown away by Ulysses, because it
combines all four genres of fiction. He calls it a complete prose epic.

Station Eleven, if we were to talk about it in our usual way, would seem like a book
that combines high culture and low cultureliterary fiction and genre fiction.
But those categories arent really adequate to describe the book. Using Fryes scheme,
we can see that its actually triply genred. Its a novel, with carefully observed scenes
set in the contemporary world of the theatre. Its a romance, with heroes wandering a
desolate post-apocalyptic landscape. (The in-set comic book is also a romance.) Its
also, as many post-apocalyptic books are, an anatomy: it tells you a lot about how the
world is put together and examines, satirically, the mental attitudes of a world thats
ended. (It doesnt incorporate the confession, but three out of four isnt bad.) Much
of the books power, in fact, comes from the way it brings together these dierent
fictional genres and the valuesobservation, feeling, eruditionto which theyre
linked. Reading it with Frye in mind, you can better appreciate the novels wide
range. Instead of being compressed, it blossoms.

Fryes way of thinking is especially valuable today because it recognizes that the clash
of genre values is fundamental to the novelistic experience. Thats how we ought to
be thinking about our books. Instead of asking whether a comic book could be as
valuable as King Lear, we ought to ask how the values of tragedy and romance
might collide. Instead of lamenting the decline of literary fiction, we ought to ask
why the novel, with its interest in society and rules, is ceding ground to the romance.
And as for the rise of the romancewith its larger-than-life passions, revolutionary
aristocrats, and nihilistic and untamable occurrencesmaybe were living in a
romantic age. The last time the romance achieved real currency, Frye points out, was
in the nineteenth century. Back then, too, it suered from the historical illusion
that it was something to be outgrown, a juvenile and undeveloped form. In fact,
romances were contemporary. They protested the new values of cities and
industrialization. They yearned for a way of life that had passed away. Apparently,
we yearn for it, too.
Correction: A previous version of this post incorrectly gave 1874 as the year Middlemarch
was first published.

Joshua Rothman is The New Yorkers archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to
about
newyorker.com, where he writes about books
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